Charges Dropped: Man Suspected of Skimming Equity from Distressed Homeowners.

Prosecutors have dropped mortgage fraud charges against a man accused of skimming home equity from distressed homeowners

The case against Thomas Cuomo could not stand in the wake of an e-mail and paper trail showing the mortgage company he was working with wasn't the victim of fraud - but instead the possible cause of it.

Cuomo, who once was a housing counselor for the Jacksonville Urban League, bought homes from people in foreclosure. At one time, he was suspected of skimming out what equity had been built up and renting them back to the original owners, promising them a chance to buy the houses back.

But the houses slipped back into foreclosure.

He was first charged in 2007 with money laundering and mortgage fraud after state investigators found similar stories from nearly a dozen people in Duval and Clay counties. That case was dismissed on a technicality.

In 2008, he was charged again, this time accused of taking out fraudulent loans.

Mitchell Stone, Cuomo's attorney in the 2008 charges, but not the previous case, said a simple e-mail trail showed that Cuomo tried to correct wrong information on his mortgage applications. For example, he said, loan documents said one of the homes was going to be owner-occupied, but Cuomo tried to correct the information to say it would be a rental.

It was Countrywide and other lenders, according to Stone, that refused to correct the wrong information so that it could make the loan, then bundle and sell it with other risky mortgages. The case is a microcosm of the wider mortgage meltdown that has sent the economy into a tailspin.

April Charney, an attorney at Jacksonville Area Legal Aid and one of the nation's experts in foreclosure law, is defending one of the foreclosures on behalf of the tenant, Lester Thomas, who sold his house to Cuomo. Thomas still lives there because the bank has not been able to prove it has the right to foreclose on it.

Charney said the case represents many of the problems with the mortgage crisis: Irresponsible lenders and irresponsible borrowers, scams perpetrated on low-income people in dire straits and the improper securitization of high-risk loans.

And, she said, it illustrates why law enforcement agencies must put more effort into investigating such cases.

From Jacksonville News

Urban League gets $15 Million Stimulus Grant

The Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis said Monday that it will receive about $15 million in funding for its weatherization program from the economic stimulus package through the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

The Urban League plans to hire 20 to 25 weatherization auditors over the next 90 days, according to spokeswoman Angelia Bills. The organization will be employing its subcontractors to do the actual weatherization work.

The new contract starts in June and runs for 18 months. The Urban League’s original funding for the program was $1.4 million. The nonprofit said the added funding will allow it to serve about 2,000 city residents over the new contract's term. The income guidelines for the expanded weatherization program will include residents with income at the 200 percent of the federal poverty level, according to a release from the Urban League.

“We are truly excited, because this grant will both increase energy efficiency and create jobs in the greater St. Louis area,” said James Buford, president and CEO of the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis, in a statement.

The Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis Inc. is a civil rights and human services organization. The agency received $13.1 million in total support and revenue for the fiscal year ended Dec. 31, 2007.

From the St. Louis Business Journal

Urban League of Greater Hartford Disciplines Its CEO


By JEFFREY B. COHEN |The Hartford Courant
February 14, 2009

James Willingham violated his contract with the Urban League of Greater Hartford when he did $15,000 in consulting work for the company that runs the city's massive school construction project, the league has confirmed.

The league said this week that it had disciplined Willingham — its chief executive officer — for the arrangement that "conflicted with the league's policy on outside employment." It would not say what that discipline entailed, and more than two dozen members of the league's board either declined to comment or did not return phone calls.

The league looked into Willingham's consulting arrangement with Diggs Construction after he acknowledged in a story in The Courant that Diggs had paid him $15,000 in 2006. In 2001, Willingham was on the six-member committee that selected Diggs to oversee the city's school construction.

Although it disciplined Willingham, the league's board "expressed its confidence" in his ability to lead the agency. Willingham declined to comment.

Although not a developer, Willingham — who federal records show made about $185,000 in the 2007 fiscal year at the Urban League — said that he used his contacts with the Urban League and his fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi, to help Diggs land a $20 million construction job in Texas.

"I didn't do anything wrong," Willingham said in December.

Willingham was one of three people on the six-member committee that chose Diggs Construction to later get paid by Diggs.

Another was former city Councilman Louis Watkins, who was chairman of the selection committee and who got an initial one-year, $3,000-a-month contract with Diggs to work as a liaison with the Hartford community in 2006. As of December, Watkins still worked for Diggs.

The third was D. Anwar Al-Ghani, who by the time his contract with Diggs Construction expires in April will have made about $680,000 working as a liaison between Diggs and its minority contractors.

Concerns about Al-Ghani's arrangement have apparently contributed to the stalling of his current effort to be reappointed by the Hartford city council to the board of the Metropolitan District Commission.

The reconstruction of Hartford schools has caught the attention of a state grand jury investigating allegations of corruption at Hartford city hall, although the scope of that interest remains unclear.

At least two people familiar with the investigation said that the grand jury had asked questions about who has been hired to work on the schools project and why.

From the Hartford Courant